naked arms were folded beneath her head and her eyes were half closed.
She was small, black-haired and olive-skinned. It was said that she had the most beautiful body in the world, and she was well aware of it.
Philippe looked at her round, sensual mouth, her short chin, her half-naked throat, and her plump, elegant legs revealed by the woman-of-the-bedchamber.
‘Put the present on the table, I’ll look at it in a moment,’ said Marguerite.
She stretched and yawned. Philippe saw her pink tongue, the roof of her mouth and her little white teeth. She yawned like a cat.
As yet, she had not once turned her eyes in his direction. He made an effort to keep himself under control. The woman-of-the-bedchamber looked covertly at Philippe in curiosity. He thought that his anger must be too apparent. He had never seen this particular duenna before. Was she newly in Marguerite’s service?
‘Am I to take back a reply to the Countess?’ he asked.
‘Oh!’ cried Marguerite, sitting up, ‘you’re hurting me, woman.’
The woman murmured an excuse. Marguerite at last consented to look in Philippe’s direction. She had beautiful dark, velvety eyes, which seemed to caress everyone and everything they looked upon.
‘Tell my sister-in-law of Poitiers …’ she said.
Philippe had moved to escape being observed by the woman-of-the-bedchamber. With a quick gesture of his hand he signed to Marguerite to send the old lady away. But Marguerite appeared not to understand; she smiled, but not in Philippe’s direction; she seemed to be smiling into the void.
‘On the other hand, perhaps not,’ she went on. ‘I’ll write her a letter for you to give her.’
Then, to the woman-of-the-bedchamber, she said, ‘That will do for the present. I must dress. Go and prepare my clothes.’
The old woman went into the next room but left the door open. Philippe realised that she was watching him.
Marguerite got up and, as she passed him, whispered almost without opening her lips, ‘I love you.’
‘Why haven’t I seen you for five days?’ he asked as quietly.
‘Oh, how pretty it is,’ she cried, unpacking the girdle. ‘What good taste Jeanne has, and how I love her present!’
‘Why haven’t I seen you?’ Philippe repeated in a low voice.
‘It’s the very thing to go with my new purse,’ Marguerite went on. ‘Messire d’Aunay, can you spare the time to wait while I write a word of thanks?’
She sat down at the table, took a goose’s quill and a piece of paper10 and signalled Philippe to draw near.
She wrote so that he could read the word over her shoulder: ‘Prudence.’
Then to the woman in attendance, who could be heard in the neighbouring room, she cried: ‘Madame de Comminges, will you fetch my daughter? I haven’t given her a kiss all morning.’
The woman went out.
‘You’re lying,’ said Philippe. ‘Prudence is a good pretext for getting rid of one lover in order to receive others.’
She was not altogether lying. It is always towards the end of an affair, when lovers either begin to quarrel or get bored with each other, that they betray themselves to those about them, and that the world takes for something new what is in fact upon the point of coming to an end. Had Marguerite said something careless? Had Philippe’s ill-temper been noted beyond the narrow world of Blanche and Jeanne? She felt absolutely certain of the porter and the chambermaid of the tower. They were two servants she had brought from Burgundy and whom she terrified with threats upon the one hand, and rewarded handsomely upon the other. But could one ever be certain? She felt that she was vaguely suspected. The King of Navarre had made several allusions to her success, husband’s jokes which did not quite ring true. And then there was this new woman-of-the-bedchamber, Madame de Comminges, who had been forced upon her a few days ago in response to a recommendation from Monseigneur Charles of Valois. She was always trailing about in her widow’s weeds. Marguerite felt herself less ready to take risks than in the past.
‘You know, you’re a bore,’ she said. ‘I love you and you never stop scolding me.’
‘Well, I shall have no opportunity to be a bore tonight,’ Philippe replied. ‘The King told us himself that there was to be no Council, so you’ll have all the time in the world to reassure your husband.’
From her expression Philippe could have guessed, had he not been so angry, that from that quarter at any rate he had nothing to fear.
‘And I shall go and visit the whores!’ he said.
‘All right,’ said Marguerite. ‘I shall be delighted to know how they set about things.’
‘Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!’ thought Philippe. You never knew how to take her; she was as slippery as an eel.
She went to an open coffer, and took out a new purse of gold thread with three catches made of large precious stones. Philippe had never seen it before.
Two days earlier Marguerite had received it as a present from her sister-in-law, the Queen of England, by the hand of a discreet messenger who had brought two similar purses for Jeanne and Blanche. A note from Isabella asked them not to talk of them, for ‘my husband watches carefully over my expenditure, and it might anger him.’
The three princesses had been somewhat surprised by their sister-in-law’s unaccustomed kindness. ‘She’s having trouble at home,’ they said to each other, ‘and wants to be in our good books.’
‘They go splendidly together,’ said Marguerite, passing the girdle through the golden loops, holding it against her waist, and going to look at herself in a huge pewter mirror.
‘Who gave you that purse?’ asked Philippe.
‘It was …’
She was quite simply going to tell him the truth. But she saw him stiffen with suspicion and was unable to resist teasing him.
‘It was … someone,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Guess.’
‘Louis?’
‘My husband isn’t as generous as that!’
‘Then, who?’
‘Can’t you guess?’
‘I want to know. I have the right to know,’ Philippe said, losing his temper. ‘It’s a present from a man, a rich man, a man in love … and because you’ve given him reason to be so, I should think.’
Marguerite went on looking at herself in the mirror, first trying the belt on one side, then on the other, then in the middle of her waist.
‘It was Robert of Artois,’ said Philippe.
‘Oh,
